Home Hammered

Who’d have thought adding the PlayStation Home icon to every PS3 owner’s XMB would result in such mass connectivity issues during Home’s inaugural weekend?

Well, we kind of did.

Keeping with Sony’s tradition of launching new games/services only for them to fall on their face, it would appear that the Home servers are crippled due to the “overwhelming demand” for the service.

Are they looking into the issues? You bet they are. Check after the jump for some more details.

If you’re unable to “Go Home” at the moment – don’t fret as you’re far from alone. With forums ablaze with people complaining about lack of access, it would appear that Sony either miscalculated the demand for the new social experiment or knowingly launched Home without the appropriate infrastructure to back it up.

Home Managers CydoniaX and Locust_Star have posted a locked thread over at the U.S. community boards promising to keep is all up to date with the ongoing server woes. Unfortunately, so far, they’veÂ just updated saying that yes – there are server woes and the engineers are still looking into it. Want to rant in an open thread about your C-931 connection error? Go right ahead.

Before the outcries of “But it’s a beta! It’s supposed to he flaky!” we’d like to say: Yes, it’s a beta but, in our opinion,Â this doesn’t justify the inability of granting people access in the first place. Maybe the launch plan should have been looked at more with the service rolled out in stages as, right of this minute, a lot of people are getting turned off Home simply because it looks like Sony didn’t think through its deployment.Â We can only hope these issues are restricted to its very early baby steps and Home becomes a more robust product over the coming days.

When we have finally managed to get in to Home we’ve been impressed by its intuitiveness and overall promise. In other words: there’s not a lot there at the moment but we’re confident this will change in time as we see new content, activities and events added to the service. We like Home. We like what Sony are trying to do here. Now they just need to iron out the launch problems before people start associating it with rickety servers not worth their time trying to connect to.

Are you having difficulties accessing Home? Getting tired tapping that “X” button in the vain hope that it will finally connect this time? Let us know in the comments below.